Autological word
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An autological word (or homological word)[1] expresses a property that it also possesses. For example, the word "word" is a word, the word "English" is (in) English, the word "writable" is writable, and the word "pentasyllabic" has five syllables.
The opposite, a heterological word, does not have the property it names. For example, the word "palindrome" is not a palindrome, "unwritable" is writable, and "monosyllabic" has more than one syllable.
These terms were coined by Kurt Grelling and Leonard Nelson in order to discuss a semantic paradox, akin to Russell's paradox: classifying the word "heterological" as either autological or heterological leads to a logical contradiction. This is now known as the Grelling-Nelson paradox.[2]
See also
[edit source]References
[edit source]- ↑ "homological", The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (2005), ed. Simon Blackburn, 2nd edition. Oxford University Press
- ↑ Grelling and Nelson used the following definition when first publishing their paradox in 1908: "Let φ(M) be the word that denotes the concept defining M. This word is either an element of M or not. In the first case we will call it 'autological', in the second 'heterological'." (Peckhaus 1995, p. 269). An earlier version of Grelling's paradox had been presented by Nelson in a letter to Gerhard Hessenberg on 28 May 1907, where "heterological" is not yet used and "autological words" are defined as "words that fall under the concepts denoted by them" (Peckhaus 1995, p. 277)
Further reading
[edit source]- Volker Peckhaus: The Genesis of Grelling's Paradox, in: Ingolf Max / Werner Stelzner (eds.), Logik und Mathematik: Frege-Kolloquium Jena 1993, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 1995 (Perspektiven der analytischen Philosophie, 5), pp. 269–280
- Simon Blackburn: The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 2nd ed. Oxford 2005, p. 30 ("autological"), p. 170 ("heterological"), p. 156 ("Grelling's paradox")
External links
[edit source]
Look up autological in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
Look up Appendix:Autological words in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.